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Guavanaut posted:0C isn't that cold, and 100C is a bit over double what you die at. well yeah, negative numbers aren't relatable to real life, after all, no use adapting to it if you move at negative speed you go backwards, if you eat negative food, you die, completely useless knowledge, best avoid negative numbers altogether
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Sep 17, 2021 23:24
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A straw poll of the local red wall gammon by a red wall gammon friend has them at “FEWMIN” over this kg to lb change. They think market stall holders and shops are going to switch back and then sneakily raise the prices on them. Well, they are not wrong…
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Sep 17, 2021 23:24
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Libluini posted:well yeah, negative numbers aren't relatable to real life, after all, no use adapting to it I did a negative food into the toilet once after drinking too much.
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Sep 17, 2021 23:27
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Libluini posted:well yeah, negative numbers aren't relatable to real life, after all, no use adapting to it Celsius is fine for cooking because if you're cooking at negative Celsius you're either cooking very wrong or you're making ice cream, but so is gas mark and anything else that people can follow, but for general weather if it's confusing to a decent chunk of people who have to use it, it's a bad customary unit. That's completely aside from metric/imperial.
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Sep 17, 2021 23:33
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Noxville posted:Lol at “I was told I could not discuss the matter with anyone - except the Samaritans” In a Bob Hoskins voice: Why don't you discuss this matter with the Samaritans, and save us all the paperwork?
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Sep 17, 2021 23:45
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Guavanaut posted:Celsius is fine for cooking because if you're cooking at negative Celsius you're either cooking very wrong or you're making ice cream, but so is gas mark and anything else that people can follow, but for general weather if it's confusing to a decent chunk of people who have to use it, it's a bad customary unit. That's completely aside from metric/imperial. As I have literally never met someone in real life who got confused by Celsius, but tons of people who get confused by Fahrenheit, I have to agree, Fahrenheit is really a bad customary unit. It's bad for both cooking and general weather.
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Sep 17, 2021 23:58
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All this talk of Samaritans made me think of this nice heavy track https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWNS_cBNpeY sends shivers down my spine. Wonderful.
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Sep 17, 2021 23:59
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Guavanaut posted:Except all of those are relative to some relative state of the system itself, and while you can get negative Kelvin temperatures in some unusual thermodynamic systems, whether a temperature is higher or lower than the freezing point of pure water at 1atm pressure doesn't tell me much about the weather, it doesn't even tell me if there'll be ice or not, whereas whether it's intuitive to the majority of people who have to use it is pretty important. Yes, if you expect your number about temperature to give you information on precipitation, then you will be disappointed by Celsius. I don't see how that is a unique problem to Celsius as a unit however?
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Sep 18, 2021 00:00
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Because people act as if it's the superior scale for measuring outside weather because something something boiling water, when they're about equal and both have their advantages and disadvantages. Like with metric and imperial there's a huge bias with what you grew up with, but I'd bet money that I could explain metric to someone who grew up on imperial faster than you could explain imperial to someone who grew up on metric, whereas it would be about the same either way with Celsius and Fahrenheit, with the disadvantage in the former case that a lot of people don't like negative numbers in casual metrology, and the advantage in the latter case that you can ballpark with "temperature goes 0-100, bring a coat below 50, chance of snow goes way up below 40". They just get lumped into the metric/imperial debate when they're both relatively new compared to measuring length or mass.
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Sep 18, 2021 00:12
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Guavanaut posted:People are bad at intuiting negative numbers too. quote:“I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher - not lower - than -8 but I'm not having it.”
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Sep 18, 2021 00:29
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Even in the mid 18th century members of the Royal Society were debating whether the whole idea of negative numbers was bollocks (centuries after China, India, and the Levant accepted them as par for the course, lol), so it doesn't surprise me if it just doesn't enter into some ways of thinking. I guess it's gotten a lot more common now with the idea of personal debt/credit/overdraft, but scratch card companies probably don't want to make people think about that too much.
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Sep 18, 2021 00:41
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I mean my intuitive temperature scale just goes from 0 to 30 which I think is entirely fine, in fact better, because I don't have to remember 70 useless numbers. I can barely feel a few degrees C difference most of the time much less need triple the resolution. And on the plus side I can use the same thermometer for measuring the weather as I do for measuring everything else.
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Sep 18, 2021 00:43
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Fahrenheit is archaic and used only in one country (+ several small islands), time will take care of it.
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Sep 18, 2021 01:14
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And on that note, the Babylonian 24:60:60 unit system is worse than imperial.
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Sep 18, 2021 01:16
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Guavanaut posted:Even in the mid 18th century members of the Royal Society were debating whether the whole idea of negative numbers was bollocks (centuries after China, India, and the Levant accepted them as par for the course, lol), so it doesn't surprise me if it just doesn't enter into some ways of thinking.
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Sep 18, 2021 01:16
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TACD posted:Relatedly, I could never get my head around imaginary numbers and thought it was all nonsense until I saw this YouTube series which explains it all very well (as well as making the point that people used to think negative numbers and fractions were bollocks too) I am 30 seconds in and I now understand less than I did when I started.
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Sep 18, 2021 01:23
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The only advantage I can see to fahrenheit is it would have avoided the fencepost error on the ECU of my old Aprilia which had a cold-start setting that ran from .1 to 10 degrees centigrade and a very-cold-start programme that worked for temperatures below zero, meaning that if the air temperature was exactly zero degrees the bike would turn over once then reboot. At zero degrees fahrenheit I'm just going back to bed rather than trying to start the bike (I assume this is why the problem wasn't picked up and fixed for five years too cos it's an Italian bike any I was literally the only person in the world dumb enough to try and ride it at that temperature). Admittedly this also holds true - for very different reasons - with Kelvin.
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Sep 18, 2021 01:33
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Engine problem: vapour lock in air filter.
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Sep 18, 2021 01:50
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 GAMMONS WILL RIOT https://twitter.com/politicshome/status/1438879134202179589?t=WLpKHPUSqAPe4eNuzjhr7A
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Sep 18, 2021 05:41
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I’d like to think that lack of access to traditional English Pisswater lager might be the final straw that makes the proles revolt but I fear the love of bootlicking in this country is so great that even a dearth of Stella Artois may not be enough.
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Sep 18, 2021 05:56
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fahrenheit's goal wasn't especially trying to make up a whole competing temperature scale, but making a far more accurate/sensitive kind of thermometer than anyone had managed before and the scale just kind of came with it the reason 0f is at a weird place is that it's the temperature of ice water reacting with salt which was both the coldest thing going at the time and also made for reasonably easy calibration you can use the same trick to get some refreshing tins from room temperature to megafrosty in a few minutes
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Sep 18, 2021 07:02
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WhatEvil posted:
So this is why americans always bitch about eco modes and the like, while water and energy saving dishwashers have always performed really well in my experience. They just get lovely products to chose from.
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Sep 18, 2021 07:09
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Guavanaut posted:And on that note, the Babylonian 24:60:60 unit system is worse than imperial. Time to bring back Swatch Internet Time
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Sep 18, 2021 07:35
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keep punching joe posted:
All mini does all day at her Amazon Morrison’s picking job is endless mixers, which they have zero shortage of, because this story has been going around for a while.
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Sep 18, 2021 08:09
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Americans announced last night that their retaliatory drone strike in Afghanistan last week didn't actually kill a bunch of militants like they said, but actually 10 civilians, including children, but they're vewwy vewwy sowwy. I know it's not UK news, but it's so loving depressing, and sums up the whole horrible war in one pointless, murderous, vindictive nutshell.
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Sep 18, 2021 08:44
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Negative numbers are just inverted numbers, it's pretty simple to intuit imo, or I never had an issue If you draw them out on a horizontal line it means you have 1 and -1 to either side of 0 in the middle I only found out about imaginary numbers recently but they just add a new dimension, so if you're drawing them out, as well as the horizontal line going from 1 to -1 with 0 in the middle, there's a vertical line with i and -i with zero in the middle. It makes every number 2d instead of 1d and makes for some snappy and easy 2d coordinate calculations. And they do that simply by imagining there's a number that's the square root of -1(the square root of 1 is 1, but -1 x -1 is 1 again. Another square root of 1), Well let's just say the square root of -1 is a number called i same as we get negatives by imagining theres a number when you do 4-5 =? Or fractional numbers by imagining there's a number when you do 7/2=? Or imagining that numbers exist at all Theyr called imaginary numbers derogitarily and it stuck, iirc the guy who proved them thought negative numbers were witchcraft and instead complicated things even more. The polite term is complex numbers But every number, even reliable old 5, who you'd think would never betray you, actually is a complex number that has an imaginary component, it's just zero, and you'd write it as 5+0i if you wanted to freak the normies. I think it'd all be as easy to grasp as negatives if they'd taught anyone it as kids. I probably got something wrong somewhere, I've only recently tried to relearn maths. Communist Thoughts fucked around with this message at 09:21 on Sep 18, 2021 |
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Sep 18, 2021 09:18
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keep punching joe posted:
I did an Ocado* order last night and there was a loooot of stuff that was out of stock. *yes, I am bourgeois scum
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Sep 18, 2021 09:20
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Communist Thoughts posted:Negative numbers are just inverted numbers, it's pretty simple to intuit imo, or I never had an issue We could try going into 3D, adding a third axis along which to numerate. But unlike the complex numbers, there's no way to make this into a system of arithmetic! It can be done in 4D of you are willing to care about the order in which you do your multiplication. There's a famous bridge about it.
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Sep 18, 2021 09:27
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I like how you can keep going up by orders but every time you find one that works, it loses a fundamental property of numbers, like quaternions are noncommutative and x·y isn't necessarily y·x, and octonions are also nonassociative so (x + y) + z isn't always x + (y + z) and eventually you just end up as things that don't work as numbers. And it's absolute madness that some of this has actual real world uses but :thatsengineering:
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Sep 18, 2021 09:45
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somewhere god has his head in his hands going "i never shoulda let these apes solve a triangle"
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Sep 18, 2021 09:59
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 (But also   )
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Sep 18, 2021 10:12
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I wonder about the role of the way maths is taught as well. The progressive de-simplification as more concepts are added and we move towards generality. Leading to the frustrated mathematician's clever idea to teach maths upside down, starting with the most general (and difficult) things at age 5, and ending up with "and that's why 1+1=2" in university. I think there was an SMBC comic about it probably. But who doesn't remember learning basic subtraction and being told 5-7 isn't anything? And then you move up to the scientific calculator level and it tells you that sqrt(-1) is "error", as is 1/0. But then you find out that if you just pretend sqrt(-1) is something, you end up with consistent maths that does useful things. But if you pretend 1/0 is something, you end up proving 1=0, so that's actually not a thing.
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Sep 18, 2021 10:18
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sqrt(-1) = p(-1)
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Sep 18, 2021 10:49
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Guavanaut posted:a lot of people don't like negative numbers in casual metrology,  where do you find those weirdos? I've literally never seen someone do this. Over here you'd be quietly committed if you start ranting about hating temperatures because they're negative. Besides, Fahrenheit also drop into negatives eventually. Or are you suggesting we all switch to Kelvin? I'd be down to that. His Divine Shadow posted:So this is why americans always bitch about eco modes and the like, while water and energy saving dishwashers have always performed really well in my experience. They just get lovely products to chose from. True, sometimes I'm reading German science blogs, and because German scientist often have to go to America to get work, there was a lot of bitching when Germans encountered US "quality". Like, my favorite was a comment from ca. 2007 by a physicist describing how they first went to a US super market to buy poo poo and found everything on offer was either cheap, broken, useless or a combination of all three, it was marvelous
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Sep 18, 2021 10:54
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keep punching joe posted:
so much for bloody carbon emissions global warming my arse end of woooooooooooigh 
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Sep 18, 2021 11:07
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Libluini posted:
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Sep 18, 2021 11:09
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Umbra Dubium posted:That bible story always bugged me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rywVlfTtlMY
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Sep 18, 2021 11:30
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Absolutely baffled that there are real people out there that don't understand negative numbers my god
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Sep 18, 2021 11:35
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:Absolutely baffled that there are real people out there that don't understand negative numbers my god Numeracy is pretty terrible across the board in this country. A majority of voters don't understand the very basics of how marginal tax rates work, so it's not surprising that some people can't grasp negative numbers. If you haven't been properly educated in it then the concept of negative anything is mind blowing.
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Sep 18, 2021 11:40
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What's your favourite number? I like 9. Square, odd, nice shape. I asked this of a colleague once while we were chatting and she thought the idea of a favourite number was insane.
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Sep 18, 2021 11:44
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